NEOWIZ is a Korea-based game developer and publisher that, since its founding in 1997, has grown to become a global leader in gaming. With a motto focused on creating magic that makes the world fun, NEOWIZ emphasizes providing content that’s original and enjoyable to users around the world.
Their idle hit Cats & Soup achieved over 23 million downloads and is still scaling. Hear from Young-Chan Kim, Head of Mobile Business Department at NEOWIZ, how switching mediation platforms to LevelPlay helped breathe new life into their game and improve performance. By making the switch and taking advantage of the suite of products available to them on LevelPlay, the NEOWIZ team optimized their waterfalls to boost in-app and ad revenue by 23%, increase eCPM by 20.5% in the US, and save time manually adjusting their monetization strategy.
Reaching more advertisers
Since publishing Cats & Soup, we were using a different mediation platform to manage our monetization. But, we saw that performance was stalling - we were spending so much time manually adjusting our hybrid waterfall that we didn’t have the resources to reach advertisers outside of a few core geos. Since our reach was limited, we often didn’t get enough advertisers competing for our ad space, which kept our fill rate low and left revenue opportunities on the table.
We heard about ironSource’s mediation solution LevelPlay, and it seemed like the platform could address our key challenges. For example, we learned that ironSource partners with not only the biggest, but also the most ad networks in the industry and allows us independently to add any network we want with custom adapters - this would expand our advertiser reach to improve fill rate and revenue.
"ironSource partners with not only the biggest, but also the most ad networks in the industry and allows us independently to add any network we want with custom adapters."
- Young-Chan Kim, Head of Mobile Business Department at NEOWIZ
Plus, they have additional products like an A/B testing tool for optimizing every part of our monetization strategy, along with in-depth reporting. So we decided to switch to LevelPlay and start taking advantage of its suite of products to improve our monetization performance.
A/B testing and adding more networks
The A/B testing tool, in particular, was very helpful for optimizing our waterfalls. For example, we set up tests for groups of geos, and the ironSource team suggested we also try testing different waterfall instances. Additionally, we tested new networks in specific geos to identify the ones that would reach more advertisers and scale revenue. By implementing the winner from each of these tests, we improved our waterfall setup for each network.
We worked closely with the ironSource team for setting up, managing, and optimizing our monetization campaigns - and implemented their recommendations for A/B testing and waterfall improvements.
"It was very easy to onboard onto LevelPlay, and managing our monetization strategy on the platform is equally simple."
- Young-Chan Kim, Head of Mobile Business Department at NEOWIZ
It was very easy to onboard onto LevelPlay, and managing our monetization strategy on the platform is equally simple. Switching to this mediation platform freed up the time we used to spend on manual adjustments and handling support tickets so we can focus on other parts of our operation, like attracting more advertisers to our app. And, we enjoy getting complete transparency into how each network is performing so we can optimize our monetization strategy more effectively and efficiently.
Getting real results: increasing revenue by 23%
Switching to LevelPlay wasn’t just an easy process - it also yielded real performance improvements. By A/B testing different features, utilizing the ironSource team’s suggestions, and improving our waterfall setup, we improved combined in-app and ad revenue by 23% and increased eCPM across geos, including by 20.5% in the US.
Since we expanded onto new networks, now we’re able to reach advertisers outside of our core countries - which increases competition, leading to improvements in both fill rate and revenue. We’re very glad we made the switch to LevelPlay and are excited to keep working with the ironSource team on growing our app and scaling revenue. We are also looking forward to applying our learnings from Cats & Soup to our next apps and achieving even more success.
